


Generations

by mercredigirl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Female Characters, Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-15
Updated: 2010-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-10 02:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/94427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercredigirl/pseuds/mercredigirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three generations of Skywalker women. A character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Generations

**Author's Note:**

> Written about two years ago, but never published nicely.

**I. Shmi Skywalker**

> What is called the serenity of age is only perhaps a euphemism for the fading power to feel the sudden shock of joy or sorrow.  
> _Arthur Bliss_

 

She stands, solitary, in the heat and the dust and the clamour of a desert world, with the weight of her only son in her arms, and his fingers digging into the cloth of the clothes on her back.

She was nine when the slavers took her family. He is nine now, almost ten, and the stranger says he'll set her son free. She doesn't know what to respond. It's the boy's freedom or her own.

Skywalker is a pilot name. When she watches the stars, late in the night and long after the two suns set, she thinks, it was Skywalkers who charted the old trade routes, Skywalkers who journeyed from the Core to the Rim. Skywalkers shaped the Galaxy.

She is a Skywalker, and she must stand for herself, but she refuses to be damned.

  
**II. korvapuusti**

> a marvellous sky and air and blue clarity, and a hoary sort of land beneath it, like a Sleeping Princess on whom the dust of ages has settled.  
> _D.H. Lawrence_

 

The youngest senator, the senator from Alderaan, Bail and Breha's daughter.

Jedi Organa Solo, New Republic Chief of State. Han's wife. (Organa Solo, her father's name and her husband's; and nothing in her life says _Amidala_ or _Skywalker_.)

Jedi Solo's mother, and the mother of the boy who died on Myrkr. Caedus's mother too; none of his fleet, even, can forget that.

But she's in her fifties now, and the lines time has drawn on her face make her resemble a woman her other father never spoke of, and whom she never knew.

She was still a princess, that day when she was so close to him she heard the wheeze of the air in his artificial lungs and saw he was a professional ideologue just as she was. When she stood in the gallery of the Death Star, and saw the explosion and felt the cold, and knew that he was just as horrified.

She argues like her mother, the Naboo queen who christened her; and she holds her lightsaber like the old man who briefly held Padmé's child. But at her core she is steel wrapped in velvet, and that is who she is.

Oh, she is the Mal'ary'ush, but it is herself and the Skywalker in her that makes her special, and she has more than shown her right to be a woman the Noghri call Lady Vader.

  
**III. Marjoram**

> call me Marah, for the Almighty has made my life bitter.  
> _Ruth 1:20, The Holy Bible_

 

She moves like a dancer, and she learnt that from the ballets at Galaxies which the Emperor enjoyed so much.

She strikes like something between guard and assassin, because the Emperor made the Noghri and Nightsisters, and all the Dark he could find, teach her.

She thinks like a Jedi rogue, because her husband turned her into one of his pupils.

But she feels – and the Force is about feeling – she feels like a Sith when she fights, and that, she had to teach herself; because no full apprentices existed after Vader, until after master and apprentice embarked on that last cycle of betrayal aboard the second Death Star.

And because she is bitter, and strong, and loving, and cruel in her compassion, she is more Jedi and more Sith than the boy in front of her; and when he smiles like the son of Luke's, she can cut him down unsmiling.


End file.
